i feel like i should give a furry timeline, ive "been a dog" for as long as I can remember, gave me and everyone i knew a dog form, then got on the internet and saw furries for the first time at about 13
i wasnt allowed free roam of the internet at that age so i wasnt on places like da or fa but i found the animation meme community on youtube (which are all furries) and loved it because there were other people who drew dogs all the time and had dog characters that represented themselves, thats when i got into digital art and started using terms like fursona (i heard other people say it so i did but i still didnt know what furries were).
no one at my school really cared (i was homeschooled till 5th, then went to really small school until 9th) but when i got to the really big school Im at now everyone was like "OMG youre a furry!!!" And I was like "NO im not i dont even know what those are" but so many people kept calling me that that i just resigned and became one
but like, at that time was when furries were really under flame and everyone thought it was a fetish, so people would kind of bully me for it or use it to define me, which at the time i didnt care cause i just liked the attention lmao. i remember telling my teacher that i was a furry, and he was like, "uhhhh thats great for you but you might not want to get to involved in that" and i was just like "oh dont worry its just for the shock value"... but from there i found out furries were actually really cool and genuinely got invested in it